Patrick White

Like The Headstone Of The Mountain Down Into the Grave Of The Valley Poem by Patrick White

LIKE THE HEADSTONE OF THE MOUNTAIN COMING DOWN

Day four: any typos or complaints should be immediately referred to the exhausted management. lol

Like the headstone of the mountain coming down like the avalanche of a deposed crowninto the grave of the valley that’s been dug for it like a housewell in the watershed of a mindstreamflowing on in the degenerating orbit of a Perseid meteor showerreplete with a potential extinction event heading for the Gulf of Mexico.Like numbered ping pong balls at a cosmic church playing Bingo.

I’m trying to spike the punch bowl with a little laughter in these wine dark seas I’m adrift on like a drunk sailor in the depths of all these sweet, sweet tears whether they’re black or white, empty as the farce of a sacred clownor full as the hidden harvest in the body of a new moon.

Who cares at this point whether it’s an sos or an lol? One is a good as the other for a last call signfrom a shipwreck with an oxymoronic sense of humourladen with a cargo of farewells like a heart with a pulse of cosmic ups and downs. Steady state or expanding like space faster than light in a race of accelerating dark energyto get to an unknown destination no one’s ever heard of beforelike the leftover Shangri La of a spiritual ghost town with an overgrown garden out back seeded with dragon’s teeth.

If tears do more good for the living than the dead, I doubt if a little laughter in the mix of underground rivers is going to do much harm to the way we get out of our mindslike angels slumming in the demonic nightclubs of paradise.When you’re as crazed as I am sometimes the only wayyou can sober up is by splashing a prayerful of counter-intuitive wisdom in your face as if you were about to meet a dark, dark mother of a goddess at a barn dance.

Let the picture music rip, let it rip, let it rip as if it were only the cosmic backbeat of rock and rollwith an occasional rim shot on a heady full moonas if its eyes had just fallen out of the sockets of a skull full of love like the crown jewels of the comets from a dark halo.

Let’s dance moondogs around the sun and roam like a pack of wild street angels patched by rainbowsin black leather like a covenant in a turf war we made like sunspots with the maculate shining we made to midwife the rebirth of the sun rising over the lunar mountain topsand sealed with a blood oath running in our veins like a mindstream rowing like a one-winged royal lifeboat merrily, merrily, like a pageant of black swans on the Thames of a terrifying dream that ends like a nightmare we’ve just been woken up from in time to realize it never endsas we go over the precipitous waterfalls like a waterclock that’s lost sense of what hour it is like Thelma and Louiselaughing in glee at the liberating thrill of the descentlike a jump school for dandelion seeds learning to pack their own parachutes out of the rags and bandages they cut out of the death shroud of Turin like the crumpled bedsheets of poetical mummies in love.

Let’s all fall together like a mammoth hunt toward paradise that’s just discovered they can fly like Dumbo the elephant by the wings of their ears riding the thermals of picture musiclike a new mutation of a red-tailed hawk on the rosary of chromosomes making wheelies on the double helix of our dna like the bead of a new moon that’s just been added like a sacred nickname for love we’ve been empowered by, the secret of the dark mystery we could never keep to ourselvesnot even now as we’re staring into oblivion when you would think we would learn to shut up and stop laughing as we’re putting these lucky pennies of past full moons on the eyelids of a death maskthat’s beginning to look more and more like us waxing and waning, ebbing and neaping like the pulse of lunar tide in a skull cup of sorrow and joy like a lava flow of new islands and lifeboatson the flatlining plains and coronation calderas on the Sea of Tranquility.

As if we all wanted to be buried in a cremation of bones on a pyre of nightskies with all our spurs, crowns, dancing shoes and boots onlike the stairwells in the whirling castles of stars in Corona Borealiswhere the elephants that never forget go to die in a Celtic graveyard of stars.

Laughing like kids sliding down the bannisters of some kindof crazy-wise afterlife in their wake and living and loving the ride so much they can’t wait to rise from their graves like the moonfrom the madness of their dreams and nightmares and do it all againas if they left just enough of the door of a total eclipse ajar to let the light in like Bailey’s beads shining through the valleysof the mountains that toppled into them like a cult of truant grave robbers playing hookey from the wheel of life and death they’ve been chained to for awhile, and not wasting a moment of the Ixionic joy of it.

We danced our way in through the entrance to life and though we’re less innocent than we used to be let’s treat death with the same respect, and dance our way out through the exit if we can. Impress Nietzschein chaos if that’s possible, cheer him up a bit: yes, we gave birth to a dancing star, we didn’t squander the dark mother’s fire womb behind all this, we didn’t waste it on anything less than poetic ecstasy from beginning to end. We blooded our abstractions and made a friend of every hungry ghost we ever danced withuntil they were made of flesh and bone like us again, fallible visionaries trying not to step on anyone’s toes like a mountains of compassion grinding it out like strippers in a mosh pit.Yes, our lives were an open book. Nothing to hide. And we were born with the eyes for it.